One Book, One County presentation tells the tale of a town recovering from meth

Thursday

Sep 13, 2012 at 3:00 PM

For the first seven decades of the 1900s, life in Oelwein, Iowa, was economically vibrant.Its hundreds of area farmers made a good living off the land. A railroad service center employed hundreds of people and rewarded their labor with generous pay. And a meat-packing company called Iowa Ham was where 60 percent of Oelwein’s workforce was employed. Its employees, too, were handsomely compensated.

Jef Rietsma

For the first seven decades of the 1900s, life in Oelwein, Iowa, was economically vibrant.Its hundreds of area farmers made a good living off the land. A railroad service center employed hundreds of people and rewarded their labor with generous pay. And a meat-packing company called Iowa Ham was where 60 percent of Oelwein’s workforce was employed. Its employees, too, were handsomely compensated.Author Nick Reding on Wednesday painted a picture of a thriving, proud community in northeast Iowa that, at its peak of 10,000 residents, was about the size of Sturgis and firing on all cylinders.Between 1970 and 1980, however, the bottom fell out on the town. Nearly two-thirds of the farms went out of business, the railroad operation closed and Iowa Ham was bought out by a company that cut wages, trimmed its workforce and eventually closed the plant.The 1980s began an ugly chapter in Oelwein’s history. Its population dwindled by 40 percent and police were uncovering an average of three methamphetamine labs a week.Reding, a 40-year-old St. Louis resident, elaborated to a great extent on Oelwein – and its problems created as a result of meth manufacturing – during his appearance at Three Rivers Public Library as part of the eighth “One Book, One County” author presentation.More than 100 people were on hand, including Sheriff Brad Balk, District Court Judge Jeff Middleton, Probate Court Judge Tom Shumaker, a trio of women incarcerated in the St. Joseph County Jail for meth-related charges, and Liz O’Dell, executive director of the Community Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services of St. Joseph County.Nobody left disappointed, as Reding partially recapped the 268-page book and elaborated on integral components. He started the 90-minute program by reading from the second chapter of his book, which detailed the misfortunes of a character named Roland Jarvis, who was a victim of the cost-cutting measures employed by Iowa Ham’s successor.In the absence of a high-paying job and figuring he could work less and make more money by producing meth, the 35-year-old Jarvis inadvertently triggered a meth-lab fire that literally burned the skin off his body.Jarvis shared details of the incident with Reding, who wrote about the situation in a detailed and grotesque, yet captivating, manner.“This is a book about a town as seen through the eyes of a (county) prosecutor, the community’s only physician, its mayor and Roland Jarvis,” Reding said.Reding went on to detail the growth of meth use and distribution, and its history as a prescribed, synthetically made drug.Of interest to most people in the audience was information about how Oelwein came to terms with its meth situation and steps it took to get a better handle on the matter.Reding mentioned the creation of a drug court as a valuable tool. He also said community leaders riled up backing from its residents to support tax increase for infrastructure improvements in hopes of luring new businesses.For the most part, the strategy worked.Reding said Oelwein will never be free of meth or any other drug. But he indicated the steps taken by municipal and county leaders were positive.On a personal note, Reding said he supports the concept of making available by prescription only cold medicines that contain ingredients used to make meth.“Nobody is hiding how (such a proposal) is being defeated in states” that put such proposals to a vote, he said, noting that lobbyists for the drug industry are too powerful to make cold medicines by-prescription only.Balk chimed in on that note, saying he urged the public to tell legislators to ignore the power of pharmaceutical lobbyists and support measures to make such medicines available by prescription only.Reding said a neighboring county to where he lives made its own ordinance to have cold medicines available by prescription only. Sales of the products dropped 90 percent from an earlier, comparable time period. Not by coincidence, the number of meth cases dropped by the same number from the identical time period.“Before the (ordinance), sales of cold medicines were the equivalent of a person having 200 colds over a 14-month period,” Reding said. “It was just mind-boggling.”

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